My Plan for Legalization of All Drugs

Stopping substance use is a failed concept, and 80 years of the most intensive war in history—the war-on-plants—has been a miserable failure. While criminalizing users and treating drug use primarily as a law enforcement issue, we’ve exploded the prison population, created an out-of-control prison-industrial-piss-test-complex, and done little to stop real drug abuse.

Meanwhile, the most dangerous drugs in the world, prescription medicines, have been handed out like M&M’s to almost every child in America. One shudders to consider the long-term, negative fall-out from the over-drugging of our kids, a significant portion of whom have already been subjected to the tortures of privatized-prisons, which scarred them for life.

Marijuana, opium and coca leaf are the world’s greatest medicines, and you can probably treat almost any medical issue those three in your medicine chest. With great medicines, however, come great responsibilities. All medicines can be abused, and the line between use and abuse is often difficult to chart. But the most serious crime is that we have lost control over the world’s three greatest medicines, not to protect us, but to protect the interests of the chemical cartel that holds the strings of real power.

My plan is to immediately legalize all three plants and allow any person to grow marijuana, coca leaf and/or poppies. However, home cultivation would be limited to family-use and it would remain illegal to concentrate plants into white powder drugs. Any violation would simply mean confiscation of the white powder substances with no further penalties. Any money exchanging hands with white-powder black-market sales would also be subject to confiscation.

I ‘d encourage the creation and sale of products containing marijuana, opium and/or coca leaf, and also permit the commercial cultivation necessary to sustain such products, all to be regulated closely. Please put the coca-leaf back into coca-cola! It’s a far better stimulant than its caffeine replacement. All products containing these three plants would be available only through liquor stores and would require ID, age to be determined at the community level, not the one-policy-fits-all approach we have now.

Of course, legal drug recreational products would be taxed. But all three medicines would be available by prescription from an MD. In this form it would not be taxed, so if you show your prescription at the cash register—no tax, baby! Taxes on all legal recreational drugs should annually be determined by the cost of all down-stream negative fallout. Cigarette tax would cover the mouth, throat and lung cancer. Alcohol tax would cover the liver diseases. If you can find any health issues with long-term use of the main three medicines, though, then any problems from increased use would be covered by the tax, which would undoubtedly remain a fraction of the tax on tobacco and alcohol.

by Steven Hager

The first reporter to document hip hop and the instigator of the film Beat Street, Hager founded the Cannabis Cup, organized the first 420 ceremonies outside of Marin County, and launched the hemp movement with Jack Herer while writing some landmark conspiracy articles.